The German Mass and Order of Service

Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts appeared in Wittenberg at the beginning of 1526, three years after Luther had issued the Formula Missae, his conservative Latin revision of the Mass. In the interval, vernacular liturgies had multiplied across the evangelical territories, each pastor and town devising its own, and Luther had been pressed repeatedly to supply an order in German for ordinary parish congregations. He had resisted, partly from reluctance to displace the Latin service he still valued, partly from fear that any order he published would be treated as law. In the autumn of 1525 he brought the Saxon court musicians Conrad Rupsch and Johann Walter to Wittenberg to help him set the chants, and the resulting work combines a theological preface, a complete Sunday service with its music, and a plan for weekday preaching and catechesis.

The preface opens with a plea, made for God's sake, that no one turn this order into a binding rule that entangles consciences. Luther then distinguishes three kinds of service: the Latin Mass, retained for schools and for the sake of the biblical languages; the German Mass, for the untaught laity in parish churches; and a third, unrealized form for those who earnestly want to be Christians, gathering in a house with mutual discipline, prayer, and almsgiving. He confesses he does not yet have the people for such a congregation and will not force it. The German Mass itself is deliberately simple: a German hymn or psalm, Kyrie, collect, epistle sung to a set tone, hymn, gospel sung to another, the creed sung in German, sermon on the gospel, a public paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer and exhortation to communicants, the words of institution sung aloud, distribution of the bread immediately after its words and then the cup, a German Sanctus, Agnus Dei, collect, and the Aaronic blessing. The canon with its sacrificial prayers is gone. The elevation is kept for now because it accords with the Sanctus. Everything is ordered so that the Word is heard and understood. Luther then lays out a weekly cycle of sermons through the catechism and the Gospels and Epistles, and insists that a plain catechism of Commandments, Creed, and Lord's Prayer be drilled into children and the simple at home and in church.

The work shaped Lutheran worship for centuries, fixing the sung vernacular service, the central sermon, and the congregational hymn as its marks, and it displays Luther's conviction that outward forms are free while the Word is not. It is also an early sketch of the catechetical program he completed in 1529.

Who should read this: pastors, liturgists, church musicians, and students of Reformation worship who want to see how Luther actually ordered a service and why. It is a working document with chant notation and rubrics, not a devotional text or a theology of the sacrament, and readers looking for either should go elsewhere.